Radio station: Radio Clásica-RNE —Spanish National Radio—

Venue/s of the event: Estudio Música 2 / Prado del Rey (Madrid)

“Ars poética” departs from the poetry of Antonin Artaud, Celso Emilio Ferreiro and Charles Bukowski, merging their words with sounds produced by a modular synthesizer and field recordings made with contact microphones

Carlos Suárez becomes, in this work, not so much a composer as, more precisely, a necromancer, bringing the aforementioned poets back from the dead, through their voices. This alchemy of the verb opens a complex process, a renewed discourse that projects itself towards the unknown, the unheard. The composer re-reads the word of the poet like the sorcerer prepares a spell. Music becomes the resonant space that amplifies the power of metaphor. Sound is the territory where the past and the future melt into the present of listening.

Carlos Suárez (Spain, 1966)
Carlos Suárez explores the compositional possibilities of field recordings. His work has been widely regarded as a revelation on how to present processed field recordings as elements of a wide and complex musical language. Furthermore, Suárez has achieved a characteristic sound identity that defines his oeuvre. Through the use of silence, textures and noise, Suárez has been able to create a very personal and creative sound world that ultimately becomes a language by and in itself.

Trained both as a composer and an ethnomusicologist, Carlos Suárez grew up between Spain and Venezuela, obtaining his composition degree at the Conservatory Simón Bolívar, in Caracas.

In 1986 he began to work as a composer, having created since then more than fifty acoustic and electroacoustic works. He has composed music for dance, theatre, radio, video, exhibitions and poetical recitals. His research trips around Venezuela began in 1989. Mainly visiting areas of indigenous cultures and Afro-Venezuelans, he compiled studies and recordings of the music, acoustic biology and soundscapes. He has transcribed more than 36,000 bars of traditional music from all over the world. He worked as researcher for “The Folklore and Ethnomusicology Foundation” and “The International Folklore and Ethnomusicology Foundation” for ten years. In 2006 he won the National Award for Culture for his book, “Los chimbángueles de San Benito”. He was also a member of the soundscape iniciative Escoitar.org, based in Galicia.